the GOP's long march

Richard Eskow explains how the GOP's 100-year war is bigger than taxes or Trump, and says of Fire and Fury that "the book, and the president's unhinged reaction to it, provide new evidence that Trump is cognitively and emotionally unfit for office." Despite the focus on Trump's (lack of) intellect, Eskow writs, "the deeper forces of history move on, and we ignore them at our peril:"

While the nation obsesses about Trump, he and his fellow Republicans are radically rewiring our political and economic order. The tax bill they passed at the end of last year proves it.

"While Democrats offer complex proposals that tinker at the margins of multiple crises and fight one holding action after another," he continues, "Republicans are thinking big:"

They want to shape the next 100 years. They understand the sweep of history, as former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett told David Sirota in a recent interview:

"Republicans have been working for at least 40 years to get to where they are now. And one of the ways they did this, is by creating a vast number of institutions and outlets for people who think the way they do to create and echo chamber, and really I call itself brainwashing ... There's nothing like this on the left. They don't put the resources into long term institutions and programs. They tend to be fireman. We're gonna rush to put out this fire, and once that fire's put out, they sit back and relax.

"Meanwhile," he adds, "the Republicans are setting other fires in lots of other places:"

The Republicans want to dismantle the collective gains of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Instead of building on the progress of the past, they want to undo it. They want to radically unmake communitarian society, while turning workplaces, medical facilities, and the landscape into scenes of pollution and bodily harm - a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, but with white men in suits and ties instead of that artist's more customary demons.